oulook 98 to xp

I recently added a new hard drive, set it as master, and set my old hd as slave. The old drive is win 98 se, with a logical partition for games. The new drive is xp. i backed up everything of importance on my old drive using Datakeeper by Powerquest. I had never tried to recover anything backed up by that ap before. i have xp mostly set up the way I want it, but I'm having trouble with some files. I can't seem to get my Outlook files from the old drive into Outlook on the new drive. When I try to import them via Datakeeper, they seem to go somewhere, but not anywhere I can find them. I really need some of my saved mail, and my address book. any help would be appreciated.

 

A search of the drive for *.pab should show you where all you have personal address book copies located. My guess is (never used that app) that when you locate the PAB you will also locate your saved email.

 

If you're using Outlook and not Outlook Express, you need to find the .pst files. Outlook keeps everything in one "Outlook.pst" file unless you exported the individual folders in your old Outlook to .pst files before you swapped out harddrives.

The following works with Outlook 2000. If you're using Outlook 2002, the details may vary...but probably not by much.

To get your stuff back, open Outlook, go to File>Import and Export, step through the wizard (choosing "Import from another program or file" in the first step and "Personal Folder File (.pst)" in the second step.

If you're using Outlook Express, it keeps its stuff in .dbx files (do a search for inbox.dbx and you'll find them all) except the address book which is either .pab or .wab.

In Outlook Express you can change the store folder for all the dbx files (OE>Tools>Options>Maintenance tab>Store Folder button) and I think it's a good idea to change it to a folder you make within My Documents. That way, you'll know exactly where to find them since the default store folder is named with a long, impossible-to-remember string of numbers.

 

Thank you both for your help. Importing from within Outlook worked fine. I thought I had tried that earlier, but being new to XP, I obviously did something wrong. Once again, this forum saved the day.